


Feast of the Holy Innocents

by gentle_herald



Category: Lord of the Flies - William Golding
Genre: 1950s Cambridge, M/M, OR IS IT, Sin and Redemption, Voice Kink, gratuitous english choral music, gratuitous liturgy, not quite an AU; more a continuation
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-03-10
Updated: 2019-03-10
Packaged: 2019-11-14 20:01:17
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,768
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18059105
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/gentle_herald/pseuds/gentle_herald
Summary: After the island, after public school, Ralph and Jack meet as choral scholars at Cambridge.





	Feast of the Holy Innocents

Howells, Wilcocks, Ord.  Major carols with descants soaring up and tumbling down, never quite under control until the day before Lessons and Carols. Minor carols going flat, going sharp, landing just on the note in harmonies that would break your heart if you weren’t singing them day in, day out since October. The Monday after Michaelmas and you start.  

Jack isn’t quite the treble he was; his angelic face has a sharp chin and angular nose now, but he’s still a countertenor who makes unearthly noises.  _Beati_ _quorum via_ , he sings,  _blessed are the undefiled who walk in the way of the Lord._  

Ralph is much as he always was; as he was supposed to be: golden haired, square jawed, with the grave kindness of a head boy and a baritone that carries  _Jerusalem_  like he means it, filthy enough to make you watch his mouth while he sings. He has a nice arse in a cassock, too, Jack thinks in the vestry, before the surplice envelops him like a tea cosy. The little boys are buzzing around their waists, their knees really. Ralph’s been at school since – the island. He might not have been with boys this age since he was one of them, and there, there's what Jack was looking for. Cautious restraint, like by looking at one of them too hard, brushing against them in the crush of elbows and flap of gathered white cloth like swan wings, pelican feathers, he might hurt one.  

The cassock collar shows a little rectangle of bare skin; Jack can see his Adam's apple and the soft vulnerable base of his throat when he breathes. He’s not sure if he wants to strangle him or rip the cassock off or shove it up. His voice soars up. Does Ralph like boys? Does he keep himself away from them? What about men who sing like boys – purity and filth, no innocence here to despoil but the artifice of it.  Ralph’s voice is so mellow, so rich. You moron, he thinks, waiting for his beat. He means the both of them.  

 

The little boys wear the black cloaks in the snow. They sing like angels and they bully each other. The quiet ones are miserable; the leaders are out for blood. He doesn’t quite have a stance on this. He did once too, and really the island was no different than everyday life in a cathedral choir school. Ralph may have thought there was some breach but it was really just an expansion – the small cruelties of life given rein.  _O Lord, in thy wrath rebuke me not_ , they sing, trebles and altos and the bases surging up under them.  

 

The liturgy of the hours. Matins. He is up early again; not that they slept late at school, but not like this, not half monastic. And yet their beds are open here, the scouts are discreet and won’t come in until half past ten, and anyways if you’re a choral scholar you’re up at five. But before then, it doesn’t matter if someone doesn’t go back to their room but spends the night sweetly in your bed. They are monks here but not celibate ones. Good old Church of England he thinks jokingly. Though perhaps monks in Spain stay after they fuck, too.  

He could get used to this, to waking up with an arm over his waist satisfying in a way that has nothing to do with sharp-edged desire and being held down, hair pulled, face shoved onto a cock until he chokes and gives up fighting. Some of the boys he fucked at school were friends and some were tarts. Some of the tarts were friends, in their way. So are the men he lets fuck him now, basses and men in Arts, mostly, people he can talk to before and after, who don’t flee him. It’s good, but none of them are Ralph.  

None of them should be Ralph. He’s aware he’s doing better than most, that he’s not furtive about this and that he’s, absurdly for a pointy faced man who cultivates the voice of a fairy, lucky in love. Or lust and friendship.  

He’s floating here, in a new world that doesn’t remember who he was at school, how he arrived ratlike and defensive, probably rabid too, an image that stayed with him all the way up. He has his music and no past and he should be worried it won’t last but he isn’t. He’s never been given to doubt, and he knows, bone deep: he’s outrun it, finally, he’s out lived the island and that he can look at these boys and see their cruelty and his as one thing is proof.  

He knows Ralph can’t.  

Absurd really, that Ralph should be sorrier than him, the good boy, the noble one, the hero of the Coral Island.  

The Lent prose:  _hear us o Lord: have mercy upon us for we have sinned against thee_ , he sings, and Ralph replies.  _Sins oft committed, now we lay before thee: with true contrition, now no more we veil them: grant us, Redeemer, loving absolution._  Ralph and his bloody absolution. The thought crosses his mind for the first time that maybe he’d like to bugger Ralph rather than be buggered by him. Absolve him a little, he thinks gritting his teeth against desire and frustration with Ralph’s scruples that imply he should have some too.  

 

Christmas Eve, estatic after Nine Lessons and Carols, he hangs back until the boys have been bundled off to bed, giddy, until the other choral scholars have left the vestry to drink whiskey with friends or fall into bed anticipating tomorrow. Ralph is hanging his cassock in the cupboard. At the front of the chapel, a verger’s footsteps are sharp on the floor, but he won’t come in here, into this little stone and plaster room that is the choir’s preserve. The Coventry Carol sings in his head. _Lullay, lullay, thou little tiny child. Herod the king in his raging, charged he hath this day, his men of might, in his own sight, all young children to slay._ Everything in his body winds tight with wanting to speak.  

Suddenly, having been on the edge for so long he’s afraid Ralph might put his sweater and scarf and coat on and just leave, he steps forward. Two, three, four, and he’s pinned Ralph against the closet and is kissing him hard, hands on his shoulders, his face, his hip. Ralph freezes like he’s considering fighting and then kisses back, wet and sloppy. Jack could cry with relief. Ralph bites his lip and suddenly he’s half hard against Ralph’s thigh; he pulls Ralph’s hips towards him and Ralph makes a strangled, huffy sound. Jack brings one hand up to the short-cropped hair at the back of Ralph’s neck; his evening stubble scratches his upper lip. His chest could burst with something – longing, joy, adrenaline. If he leaves Ralph’s arms or the vestry he might never get back.  

Ralph whispers, “Come back with me.” 

Jack says, surprising himself with his honesty and his level voice, “I don’t want to let you go.” 

“I don’t either. Come.” And Jack steps back so they can put on their coats, hand trailing along Ralph’s hip in the letting go.  

They walk through the snow and the lamplight side by side – tall men in college scarves and ties and long overcoats, and the crime they are about to commit is nothing to the crimes they committed as children. By asking him back, is Ralph a co-conspirator? Has he needlessly repented for the island? Has he forgiven Jack, or taken the guilt on himself so he doesn’t need to forgive? Will he take or be taken? Does that tell? 

They climb Ralph’s staircase in the dark. Jack is vaguely nervous about not returning to his rooms without making plans in advance – will his alarm clock ring unattended? Ralph closes the door behind him and slams him into it, kissing him. This is worth an alarm shrilling, unstopped.  

They fumble their coats off, onto the coat tree, boots off, scarves dropped in a heap. He gets to undress Ralph like he has wanted to all term. It is tender. He surprises himself over and over with his capacity for tenderness – with Ralph, with the men who fuck him. Why am I surprised, he thinks, why do I notice this? 

He kisses down the centre of Ralph’s chest as he unbuttons his shirt. He licks little circles over his nipples and Ralph gasps. The room is too cold for them to stand around naked, so the rest of the undressing goes quicker than he’d like, each stripping off their own belt, trousers, pants, socks, and then he stands a little lost until Ralph bundles him under the covers and then straddles him. The sheets are cold against his back but Ralph’s cock and balls are hot on his belly; his cock presses up to Ralph’s taint. His cock is sticky against Jack’s belly and Ralph thrusts a little, head dropping forward, flushing prettily. Jack reaches up and flattens his palm against that broad chest, pinches a rosy nipple. Ralph moans.  

There is something naked about his desire that Jack finds utterly compelling and a little concerning, too. There is no guile in Ralph, no strategy, and his self-preservation is just honest competence and shining, unforced charisma. They rock against each other, Ralph reaching back for Jack’s cock, lining them up on Jack’s belly, dropping down and thrusting, hard, between their bodies. Jack clings to Ralph’s gorgeous rugby-playing arse and on some blessed instinct Ralph takes his wrists and rests all his weight on them. He’s almost gone; they both are. Their cocks slide together, desperate, and they’re half-blind with desire and the unbridled joy of skin to skin contact. Jack comes first, weighed down by Ralph, weightless with pleasure, and as he comes down from the ecstasy of it he watches Ralph screw his eyes shut and come, shaking, all the tension going out of him. He collapses between Jack and the wall and gropes blindly for Jack, rests his head on his shoulder and throws one knee over his legs. Incautious, Jack wipes their bellies with the side of the sheet and then fixes the blanket over them. It is maybe one, and outside is the pale-pink glow of night-fallen snow and the trite but soul-deep stillness of Christmas. He looks at Ralph at too close range to focus. Ralph is already asleep, body limp and melting into his. Jack joins him. 


End file.
